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June 19, 1998

Subtracting Jobs

DALLAS -- Texas Instruments is eliminating 3,500 jobs worldwide because of the weak semiconductor market, which has been battered by lower prices from Asian competitors and reduced demand for computer memory chips.

Texas Instruments said Thursday that the jobs would be cut as part of a restructuring that includes the sale of its memory chip business to Micron Technology for a combination of Micron stock and debt totaling approximately $800 million.

TI said the jobs -- about 8 percent of its payroll -- would be pared through layoffs and attrition. It did not say how many U.S. jobs would be trimmed.

TI expects the layoffs to be implemented within the next few months, saving about $270 million a year.

Stocks Slip A Bit

NEW YORK -- Wall Street settled back into a rut Thursday as stocks edged lower and emotional swings gave way to the uncertain outlook that has dominated the market for months.

In contrast to Monday's 207- point tumble and Wednesday's 164-point rebound, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 16.45 points, to 8,813.01, never straying as much as 40 points in either direction.

Have You Heard?

In their time, inventions such as carbon paper, two-color typewriter ribbons and adding machines were to office workers what a Pentium II personal computer is today.

Computer maker Hewlett- Packard, in its newsletter HP Office News, traces the evolution of workplace technology with a timeline, and reports that carbon paper, which was made obsolete by photo copiers, made its appearance in the 1870s, and that red-and-black ribbons (who needs them, now that we have color printers?) showed up shortly after the turn of the century.

Adding machines, meanwhile, developed in stages. According to Hewlett- Packard, calculating machines arrived in offices in the 1880s, but it took another four decades before machines that could both add and subtract were invented.

Typewriters (remember them?) showed up in the 1870s, and did not become electric until the 1930s. Today these are all antiques.